I Guess it was a Water Pistol…

There is no stopping the pistol offense!!!!!  It’s amazing, undefendable, the wave of the NFL future is the pistol!!!  Any decent QB in College will now thrive in the NFL!!!

Obviously that isn’t a direct quote, but it is pretty damn close to how the media reacted 2 years ago when the pistol offense was all the rage.  Robert Griffin, Colin Kaepernick and Russell Wilson were unstoppable and FINALLY the running QB was here to stay in the NFL.  Just like in 1989 when Randell Cunningham was succeeding, just like in 2001 when Michael Vick broke in and Donovan McNabb was thriving.

The media can be SO stupid sometimes.  It was the same thing with Tim Tebow.  I never once jumped on the Tebow bandwagon, nor did I jump on the water pistol offense bandwagon.  In fact I’m pretty certain you can go back to last season, any piece I wrote (mainly betting pieces) and see if I ever bought it.  That isn’t to say I’m not wrong about A LOT of things, I just wasn’t stupid enough to jump on either of these fad’s.

Same thing EVERY SINGLE TIME.  Once coaches get film on any kind of gimmick in the NFL, they’ll come up with a scheme to shut it down.  Remember the wildcat offense?  Of course you don’t, because it died instantly.  But the Dolphins got the only division title the Pats haven’t in the AFC East since 2002 by running the wildcat.  The next season just about every team had a wildcat package, and it did nothing.  Brees, Manning, Favre, Rivers, Brady, none of the elite QB’s needed it that season.  Weird…

Colin Kaepernick isn’t digressing.  Teams have film on the pistol now and know how to shut it down.  So Kaepernick is getting used less and less in the pistol and being forced to throw from the pocket…and he is being exposed.  He has zero touch on the ball, and can’t handle any kind of pass rush.  So when the pocket is muddied, he’s basically useless.

But he isn’t as useless as RGIII has become.  As I said last week, I still think he can become a real good NFL QB if he goes to the right situation.  But right now he is a mess and part of that is again that coaches have figured out the pistol, so he can’t do half the stuff that made him successful in 2012.  Now he has to be a pocket guy and what do you know?  He is a complete mess mechanically.

And should we really be shocked that while Kaepernick and Griffin can do without it, Wilson….the ADULT of the 3 guys, has been just fine?  Russell Wilson has next to nothing to work with on offense, and is still getting the job done.  No, he’s not putting up amazing numbers, but he is making plays and all the right decisions.  He’s not a pocket guy, he’s a scrambler.  But he can still drop back and make all the throws when he has to, which the former 2 can’t.

Wilson isn’t out there looking to be the celebrity QB that Kaepernick and Griffin are either.  He has endorsements, but he’s all business.  Every time I see Wilson I think “it bugs me that he’s a geek who tries to sound cool at times, but I would much rather that than a guy who thinks he has to be cool”.  Kaepernick and RGIII, whether they do or don’t ACTUALLY think this, give the impression that endorsements and instagram accounts and sick headphones are a bigger deal than winning football games.

But that really has nothing to do with the water pistol.  It was a fad, just like the wildcat, just like Tebow, just like Bieber, just like undercuts….which are still sweet.

I hope the media figures this out someday.  But they won’t.  In 5-10 years something will happen that will have the media geeked again.  THIS will be the time that running QB’s are the wave of the future, just like 2012 and 2013 were.  How about this crazy thought: find a QB who makes throws from the pocket?  It’s worked forever.

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